Our product will be called “Pool”, referencing how users will be able to “pool” together all their rewards points from a variety of loyalty rewards programs. The vision behind Pool is that users will be able to have all their points centralised, be able to trade points they don’t want with other users, and buy points. We considered several user personas for this including frugal students, tech enthusiasts, people who eat out and travel a lot, and people who own points but never know where they are or what to do with them.
Although not part of the sanity pitch deck, we will be looking into ways of gamifying the product by implementing features like leaderboards (“Defne is spent the most points at Verve this month!”) in exchange for rewards.
For our target market, we’d like to target a younger, app-savvy demographic first. This would be financially independent, young individuals between the ages of 20 and 35. For an even more targeted market (our SOM), we will hone in on young individuals in the Bay Area, so college students, young people in tech, or tech enthusiasts living in the area, but mostly people who care about saving money through points. We can then expand to all young early adopters of this system in the U.S., and make sure we cover bases such as retail, hospitality, restaurant, drinks, and any other types of points they may use. The TAM for loyalty rewards is estimated to become $17.65B by 2028, so we want to target a small portion that would be worth $155M in our SOM.
Our tech stack should enable us to create a mobile app interface as well as a way to interact with the blockchain. The user-facing side of this product does not mention the blockchain at all, but we need it in the backend to store and exchange our points. For frontend, we’ll use React Native, and for the backend, use GCP. For the blockchain aspect, we can use Alchemy and Crossmint.
Our revenue model will be to partner with companies who would like to incorporate us into their platform and to take a cut from transactions. Additionally, when using our recommendation algorithm for where someone may be able to trade their points, we may feature some companies if that is an additional revenue model we decide to explore.
Ethical considerations should be around the recommendation algorithm (are we really incentivising people to trade for what they’re interested in?), as well as potential ways that this may affect small businesses who are unable to become part of this points system (we don’t know how big of a challenge that’ll be just yet). We also considered the outcome that some people could trade points in a way that could create a profit for them, but we don’t expect much exploitation in terms of that.
Our first pass BMC is attached to this post.
